BU Launchpad lifts off

By Jake Strautmann | Published June 2026

Across its 17 schools and numerous centers and organizations, Boston University offers an abundance of internship opportunities, mentorship programs, and communities of students who share academic and career goals. Even so, first-year students often struggle to secure internships, as employers tend to prioritize students with more academic and professional experience. Yet these internships are often critical to their future success.

Now, the University is creating a new program—called BU Launchpad—that will provide cohesive career support to students from their very first year.

“Boston University Launchpad is the University’s new internship and career education initiative for first-year students,” explains President Melissa Gilliam. “This program promotes early access to internships so students build skills, confidence, and relationships from the beginning of their college careers.”

BU Launchpad will offer work-integrated learning through meaningful, career-related experiences designed to build transferable skills in a professional setting. These experiences will:

• Be funded, equalizing opportunities for all students.
• Enable students to apply classroom knowledge to real-world situations
• Have clearly defined learning goals that support students’ academic goals and institutional requirements.
• Involve direct supervision by a professional with relevant expertise who provides feedback, guidance, resources, and equipment.

Marissa Carty (CAS’22, SSW’27) exemplifies how an internship can pay dividends over the long term. As a student, she completed a BU Yawkey-funded internship at the Mental Health Collaborative (MHC) that later launched her nonprofit career. After graduating from BU in 2022, she joined MHC full time to design community mental health programs.

Since then, Carty has delivered more than 100 trainings to over 12,000 people, raised $300,000, supervised volunteers and interns, and even hired the next generation of BU Yawkey interns.

Managed by the Center for Career Development, BU Launchpad will begin with a cohort in summer 2026. It will provide summer internships between students’ first and second years, along with career mentoring and a sustaining cohort of like-minded peers.